Dead But Not Forgotten by Charlaine Harris Read Free Book Online

it was linked into the car via Bluetooth, and now the number showed up on the little screen at the center of the dashboard. Quinn made his living as an event planner and the caller was a client.
    He tightened his fingers on the wheel, knuckles going white as he waited for the ringing to cease. When it had, he reached into the console and plucked out the phone, then tried gamely to keep his eyes on the road as he powered it off and tossed it onto the seat beside him. No clients today.
    Quinn steadied himself, then glanced down to see that he’d let the car creep up to nearly eighty miles per hour when the speed limit was sixty-five. As he eased off the pedal and the speedometer needle dipped, he spotted the nose of a Louisiana state police car ahead, half-hidden behind the supporting column of an overpass.
    â€œStay right there, my friend,” Quinn said as he drove past the police car, checking his speedometer again.
    Sixty-eight miles per hour. The cop stayed on the side of the road.
Good for you,
Quinn thought.
Good for both of us.
    Not that he was in the habit of starting fights with police officers, but if there was ever going to be a day when it would be easy to rile the tiger in him, it would be today.
    Ever since the world’s shifters had revealed their existence to the public, things had changed. When vampires had done it, fear and curiosity had raged, but the typical human expected to be able to look at a vampire and notice that he or she was something other than ordinary. It wasn’t that simple, but many humans comforted themselves with the idea that it could be. Now that the two-natured—beings who could shapeshift between a human form and that of an animal—had stepped into the light, human society was more unsettled than ever. There was virtually zero chance that your mailman could be a vampire . . . but could he turn into a wolf or a dog? A distinct possibility.
    That unsettled the hell out of people.
    Incidents of violence had begun on the first day. Though new laws protected his kind, Quinn had heard many stories of persecution. He didn’t worry for himself, but for his mother and his sister, Frannie, not to mention his girlfriend, Tijgerin, and their baby. He comforted himself with the knowledge that it was easier for weres to live among humans than it was for vampires. Most people had at least one two-natured friend or relative and never even knew it.
    Today, his mother was foremost on his mind. Unlike vampires, Quinn’s people suffered the tribulations of aging, and as they grew old and infirm they needed to be looked after in a safe environment. Once, it had been necessary to hide them, to keep their true nature a secret. Now aging and ailing shifters were kept apart from their human counterparts purely to ensure that they did not put themselves or anyone else in peril.
    Vicki Quinn had spent a long time in nursing homes specifically for the two-natured. She suffered delusions and sometimes violent schizophrenic behavior stemming from psychological trauma, but recently her condition had deteriorated further. When she had begun to experience deepening dementia, the doctors at her previous residence had recommended a move to Evergreen Manor, a newer facility that offered treatments that might slow the progression of her illness.
    Quinn turned off the highway and followed dimly remembered directions that, minutes later, brought him along a narrow, tree-lined street where a black wrought-iron fence guarded the grounds of Evergreen. For the sake of the residents, the facility’s director would have said, to keep them from wandering off. But the fence was as much for the safety of the humans living near the property as for the patients. Either a werewolf with senile dementia or a pup going through the madness that sometimes gripped them during their teen years could do plenty of damage.
    Tense and flushed with frustration, he gave his name to the guard at the booth and